Tag Archives: Politics

Imagine that you manage a restaurant, and suddenly during the evening shift a middle-aged woman stands up, points to another diner, and yells “Murderer!” She loudly appeals to everyone to help her restrain and punish this supposed murderer. (Think Catelyn seizing Tyrion in GoT.) When other diners are shy, she demands that you expel this murderer from your restaurant. She says that in a civilized society it is every good person’s duty to oppose murder, and explains her belief that her husband went to an early grave because this older man, her boss, worked him too hard. Sure her husband could have quit his job instead, but he just wasn’t that sort of person.

Will you expel this customer as requested? Probably not. Yes there is a plausible meaning of the word “murder” that applies, but the accused must satisfy a narrower meaning for such an appeal to move you. In this post I will suggest that we take a similar restricted attitude toward “racism” in politics. Let me explain.

Humans have many ways to persuade one another. We can make deals, or we can appeal to self-interest, mutual reciprocity, or shared loyalties. In addition, we can appeal to shared moral/social norms. This last sort of appeal draws on our unique human capacity to enforce what Boehm calls a “reverse dominance hierarchy.” Foragers coordinated to express norms, to monitor for violations, to agree on who is guilty, and then to punish those violators. Such norms covered only a limited range of behaviors, those worth the trouble of invoking this expensive, corruptible, and error-prone mechanism.

With farming and civilization we have introduced law. With law, we added a formal specialized process to support a subset of our especially shared, important, clear, and enforceable norms. Foragers would entertain most any argument against most anyone that most any behavior was a norm violation. For example, a band could declare a disliked forager guilty of using sorcery, even if no concrete physical evidence were offered. But farmer law usually limited accusations to clearly expressed pre-existing law, and limited the kinds of evidence that could be offered.

For example, multiple witnesses were often required, and instead of relying on median public opinion a special judge or jury looked into more detail to make a decision. Negligence levels are made extra forgiving due to the chance of honest mistakes. To be a good candidate for enforcement by farmer law, a norm needed especially wide support, and to be especially clear and easy to prove even by those unfamiliar with the details of a particular person’s habits and life. And the norm needed to be important enough to be worth paying the extra costs of legal enforcement, including a substantial expected level of error and corruption.

In the last few centuries governments have mostly taken over the “criminal” area of law, where it is now they who investigate and prosecute accusations, and punish the guilty. Because such governments can be more corruptible, error-prone, and inefficient, the criminal law process is only applied to an especially important subset of law. And even more restrictions are placed on government law, such as juries, statutes of limitations, prison as punishment, proportionate punishment, and a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof. To avoid costs of error and enforcement, we often try to catch fewer violators and punish them more strongly to compensate.

Today, many kinds of political arguments are offered for and against people, organizations, and policies. While many arguments appeal to self-interest and shared loyalties, others demand priority because of norm violations. The claim is that whatever other different interests we may have and pursue, it is essential that we set those aside to coordinate to punish key norm violations. And since many of these norms are, for various reasons, not enforced by formal law, we depend on other good people and organizations to respond to such moral calls to action.

And this all makes sense so far. But in the last half century in the West, preferences against “racism” have risen to at least near the level of moral norms. (We have related feelings on “sexism” and other “isms” but in this post I’ll focus on racism for concreteness.) Whatever else we may disagree on, we are told, we must coordinate to oppose racists, boycotting their businesses and drumming them out of public office. Which could make sense if enough of us agree strongly enough to make this a priority, and if we share an effective way to collectively identify such violations.

One problem, however, is that our commonly used concepts of “racism” seem more appropriate to ordinary conversation and persuasion than to usefully enforceable strong norms and law. Some favor concepts where most everyone is at least a bit racist, and others concepts based on hard-to-observe dispositions. But while such concepts may be useful in ordinary conversation or academic analysis, they are poorly suited for enforcing strong norms and law.

For example, many today claim that Trump is clearly racist, and invoke a shared norm against racism in their appeal for everyone to oppose Trump. No good person, they suggest, should cooperate in any way with Trump or his supporters. A good person can’t treat this as politics as usual, not when a norm violator stands among us unpunished! It is even hinted that people with positions of influence in important institutions, such as in media, academia, journalism, law, and governance, should deviate from their usual practice of following institutional norms of political neutrality, and instead tip the scales against Trump supporters, now that everything is at stake.

But as Scott Alexander recentlytried to argue, the evidence offered for Trump racism doesn’t yet seem sufficient to hold up in a legal court, not at least if that court used a “racism” concept of the sort law prefers. If your concept of “racist” applies to a third of the population, or requires a subjective summing up of everything you’ve ever heard about the accused, it just won’t do for law.

Yes, people are trying Trump in a court of public opinion, not in a court of law. But my whole point here is that there is a continuum of cases, and we should hold a higher more-restrictive more-law-like standard for enforcing strong norms than we should in ordinary conversation and persuasion. Higher standards are also needed for larger more varied communities, when there are stronger possibilities of bias and corruption, and when the enforcing audience pays less attention to its job. So we should be a lot more careful with who we call “racist” than who we call “hot” or “smart”, for example. For those later judgements, which are not the basis of calls to enforcement of shared strong norms, it is more okay to just use your judgement based on everything you’ve heard.

Now I haven’t studied Trump or his supposed racism in much detail. So maybe in fact if you look carefully enough there is enough evidence to convict, even with the sort of simple clear-cut definition of “racism” that would make sense and be useful in law. But this appeal to norm enforcement should and will fail if that evidence can’t be made clear and visible enough to the typical audience member to whom this appeal is targeted. We must convict together or not at all; informal norm enforcement requires a strong consensus among its participants.

Maybe it is time to enshrine our anti-racism norm more formally in law. Then we could gain the benefits of law and avoid the many costs of informal mob enforcement of our anti-racism norms. I really don’t know. But I have a stronger opinion that if you are going to appeal to our sense of a strong shared norm against something like racism, you owe it to us all to hold yourself to a high standard of a clear important and visible violation of a nearly-law-appropriate concept. Because that is how law and norm enforcement need to work.

Yes we are limited in our ability to enforce norms and laws, and this limits our ability to encourage good behavior. And it may gall you to see bad behavior go unpunished due to these limitations. But wishes don’t make horses, and these costs are real. So until we can lower such costs, please do be careful who you call a “racist.”

In a repeated game, where the same people play the same game over and over, cooperation can more easily arise than in a one-shot version of the game, where such people play only once and then never interact again. This sort of cooperation gets easier the more that players care about the many future iterations of the game, compared to the current iteration.

When a group repeats the same game, but some iterations count much more than others, then defection from cooperation is most likely at a big “endgame” iteration. For example, spies who are moles in enemy organizations will usually hide and behave just as that organization wants and expects, waiting for a very big event so important that it can be worth spending their entire career investment to influence that event.

Many of our institutions function well because most participants set aside immediate selfish aims in order to conform to social norms, thereby gaining more support from the organization in the long term. But when one faces a single very important “endgame” event, one is then most tempted to deviate from the norms. And if many other participants also see that event as very important, then your knowing that they are tempted more to deviate tempts you more to deviate. So institutions can unravel when faced with very big events.

I’ve been disturbed by rising US political polarization over recent decades, with each election accompanied by more extreme rhetoric saying “absolutely everything is now at stake!” And I’ve been worried that important social institutions could erode when more people believe such claims. And now with Trump’s election, this sort of talk has gone off the charts. I’m hearing quite extreme things, even from quite powerful important people.

Many justify their extreme stance saying Trump has said things suggesting he is less than fully committed to existing institutions. So they must oppose him so strongly to save those institutions. But I’m also worried that such institutions are threatened by this never-compromise never-forget take-no-prisoners fight-fight-fight mood. If the other side decides that your side will no longer play by the usual institutional norms of fairness, they won’t feel inclined to play fair either. And this really all might go to hell.

So please everyone, dial it back a bit. Yes, if for you what Trump has already done is so bad that no compromise is tolerable, well then you are lost to me. But for the rest of you, I’m not saying to forgot, or to not watch carefully. But wait until Trump actually does something concrete that justifies loudly saying this time is clearly different and now everything is at sake. Yeah that may happen, but surely you want Trump folks to know that isn’t the only possible outcome. There need to be some things Trump folks could do to pursue some of their agendas that would be politics as usual. Politics where your side doesn’t run the presidency, and so you have to expect to lose on things where you would have won had Clinton become president. But still, politics where our existing institutions can continue to function without everyone expecting everyone else to defect from the usual norms because now everything is at stake.

Added 21Nov: Apparently before the election more people on Trump’s side were talked about presuming the election was rigged if their side lost. Without concrete evidence to support such accusations, that also seems a lamentable example of defecting from existing institutions because now everything is at stake. HT Carl Shulman.

People are complicated. Not only can each voter be described by a very high dimensional space of characteristics, the space of possible sets of voters is even larger. Because if this, coalition politics is intrinsically complex, making innovation possible and relevant.

That is, at any one time the existing political actors in some area use an existing set of identified political coalitions, and matching issues that animate them. However, these existing groups are but a tiny part of the vast space of possible groups and coalitions. And even if one had exhaustively searched the entire space and found the very best options, over time those would become stale, making new better options possible.

As usual in innovation, each actor can prefer to free-ride on the efforts of others, and wait to make use of new coalitions that others have worked to discover. But some political actors will more explore new possible coalitions and issues. Most will probably try to for a resurgence of old combinations that worked better in the past than they have recently. But some will try out more truly new combinations.

We expect those who innovate politically to differ in predictable ways. They will tend to be outsiders looking for a way in, and their personal preferences will less well match existing standard positions. Because innovators must search the space of possibilities, their positions and groups will be vaguer and vary more over time, and they will less hew to existing rules and taboos on such things. They will more often work their crowds on the fly to explore their reactions, relative to sticking to prepared speeches. Innovators will tend to arise more when power is more up for grabs, with many contenders. Successful innovation tends to be a surprise, and is more likely the longer it has been since a major innovation, or “realignment,” with more underlying social change during that period. When an innovator finds a new coalition to represent, that coalition will be less attracted to this politician’s personal features and more to the fact that someone is offering to represent them.

The next US president, Donald Trump, seems to be a textbook political innovator. During a period when his party was quite up for grabs with many contenders, he worked his crowds, taking a wide range of vague positions that varied over time, and often stepped over taboo lines. In the process, he surprised everyone by discovering a new coalition that others had not tried to represent, a group that likes him more for this representation than his personal features.

Many have expressed great anxiety about Trump’s win, saying that he is is bad overall because he induces greater global and domestic uncertainly. In their mind, this includes a higher chances of wars, coups, riots, collapse of democracy, and so on. But overall these seem to be generic consequences of political innovation. Innovation in general is disruptive and costly in the short run, but can aide adaptation in the long run.

So you can dislike Trump for two very different reasons, First, you can dislike innovation on the other side of the political spectrum, as you see that coming at the expense of your side. Or, or you can dislike political innovation in general. But if innovation is the process of adapting to changing conditions, it must be mostly a question of when, not if. And less frequent innovations are probably bigger changes, which is probably more disruptive overall.

So what you should really be asking is: what were the obstacles to smaller past innovations in Trump’s new direction? And how can we reduce such obstacles?

Many seem to think the apocalypse is upon us – I hear oh so much much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But if you compare the policies, attitudes, and life histories of the US as it will be under Trump, to how they would have been under Clinton, that difference is very likely much smaller than the variation in such things around the world today, and also the variation within the US so far across its history. And all three of these differences are small compared the variation in such things across the history of human-like creatures so far, and also compared to that history yet to come.

That is, there are much bigger issues at play, if only you will stand back to see them. Now you might claim that pushing on the Trump vs. Clinton divide is your best way to push for the future outcomes you prefer within that larger future variation yet to come. And that might even be true. But if you haven’t actually thought about the variation yet to come and what might push on it, your claim sure sounds like wishful thinking. You want this thing that you feel so emotionally invested in at the moment to be the thing that matters most for the long run. But wishes don’t make horses.

To see the bigger picture, read more distant history. And maybe read my book, or any similar books you can find, that try seriously to see how strange the long term future might be, and what their issues may be. And then you can more usefully reconsider just what about this Trump vs. Clinton divide that so animates you now has much of a chance of mattering in the long run.

When you are in a frame of mind where Trump (or Clinton) equals the apocalypse, you are probably mostly horrified by most past human lives, attitudes, and policies, and also by likely long-run future variations. In such a mode you probably thank your lucky stars you live in the first human age and place not to be an apocalyptic hell-hole, and you desperately want to find a way to stop long-term change, to find a way to fill the next trillion years of the universe with something close to liberal democracies, suburban comfort, elites chosen by universities, engaging TV dramas, and a few more sub-generes of rock music. I suspect that this is the core emotion animating most hopes to create a friendly AI super intelligence to rule us all. But most likely, the future will be even stranger than the past. Get a grip, and deal with it.

There are futurists who like to think about the non-immediate future, and there are radicals who advocate for unusual policies, such as on work, diet, romance, governance, etc. And the intersection between these groups is larger than you might have expected by chance; futurists tend to be radicals and radicals tend to be futurists. This applies to me, in that I’ve both proposed a radical futarchy, and have a book on future ems.

The usual policies that we adopt in our usual world have a usual set of arguments in their favor, arguments usually tied to the details of our usual world. So those who want to argue instead for radical policies must both argue against the usual pro-arguments, and then also offer a new set of arguments in favor of their radical alternatives, arguments also tied to the details of our world. This can seem like a heavy burden.

So many who favor radical policies prefer to switch contexts and reject the relevance of the usual details of our world. By invoking a future where many things change, they feel they can just dismiss the usual arguments for the usual policies based on the usual details of our world. And at this point they usually rest, feeling their work is done. They like being in a situation where, even if they can’t argue very strongly for their radical policies, others also can’t argue very strongly against such policies. Intellectual stalemate can seem a big step up from the usual radical’s situation of being at a big argumentative disadvantage.

But while this may help to win (or at least not lose) argument games, it should not actually make us favor radical policies more. It should instead shift our attention to robust arguments, ones can apply over a wide range of possibilities. We need to hear positive arguments for why we should expect radical policies to work well robustly across a wide range of possible futures, relative to our status quo policies.

In my recent video discussion with James Hughes, he criticized me for assuming that many familiar elements of our world, such as property, markets, inequality, sexuality, and individual identities, continue into an em age. He instead foresaw an enormous hard-to-delimit range of possibilities. But then he seemed to think this favored his radical solution of a high-regulation high-redistribution strong global socialist government which greatly limits and keeps firm control over autonomous artificial intelligences. Yet he didn’t offer arguments for why this is a robust solution that we should expect to work well in a very wide variety of situations.

It seems to me that if we are going to focus on the axis of decentralized markets vs. more centralized and structured organizations, it is markets that have proven themselves to be the more robust mechanism, working reasonably well in a very wide range of situations. It is structured organizations that are more fragile, and fail more quickly as situations change. Firms go out of business often when their organizations fail to keep up with changing environments; decentralized markets disappearing because they fail to serve participants happens far less often.

Joseph said .. Let Pharaoh .. appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years. .. And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine. And the thing was good in the eyes of Pharaoh. (Genesis 38)

[Medieval Europe] public authorities were doubly interested in the problem of food supplies; first, for humanitarian reasons and for good administration; second, for reasons of political stability because hunger was the most frequent cause of popular revolts and insurrections. In 1549 the Venetian officer Bernardo Navagero wrote to the Venetian senate: “I do not esteem that there is anything more important to the government of cities than this, namely the stocking of grains, because fortresses cannot be held if there are not victuals and because most revolts and seditions originate from hunger. (p42, Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution)

63% of Americans don’t have enough saved to cover even a $500 financial setback. (more)

Even in traditional societies with small governments, protecting citizens from starvation was considered a proper of role of the state. Both to improve welfare, and to prevent revolt. Today it could be more efficient if people used modern insurance institutions to protect themselves. But I can see many failing to do that, and so can see governments trying to insure their citizens against big disasters.

Of course rich nations today face little risk of famine. But as I discuss in my book, eventually when human level artificial intelligence (HLAI) can do almost all tasks cheaper, biological humans will lose pretty much all their jobs, and be forced to retire. While collectively humans will start out owning almost all the robot economy, and thus get rich fast, many individuals may own so little as to be at risk of starving, if not for individual or collective charity.

Yes, this sort of transition is a long way off; “this timeisn’t different” yet. There may be centuries still to go. And if we first achieve HLAI via the relatively steady accumulation of better software, as we have been doing for seventy years, we may get plenty of warning about such a transition. However, if we instead first achieve HLAI via ems, as elaborated in my book, we may get much less warning; only five years might elapse between seeing visible effects and all jobs lost. Given how slowly our political systems typically changes state redistribution and insurance arrangements, it might be wiser to just set up a system far in advance that could deal with such problems if and when they appear. (A system also flexible enough to last over this long time scale.)

The ideal solution is global insurance. Buy insurance for citizens that pays off only when most biological humans lose their jobs, and have this insurance pay enough so these people don’t starve. Pay premiums well in advance, and use a stable insurance supplier with sufficient reinsurance. Don’t trust local assets to be sufficient to support local self-insurance; the economic gains from an HLAI economy may be very concentrated in a few dense cities of unknown locations.

Alas, political systems are even worse at preparing for problems that seem unlikely anytime soon. Which raises the question: should those who want to push for state HLAI insurance ally with folks focused on other issues? And that brings us to “universal basic income” (UBI), a topic in the news lately, and about which many have asked me in relation to my book.

Yes, there are many difficult issues with UBI, such as how strongly the public would favor it relative to traditional poverty programs, whether it would replace or add onto those other programs, and if replacing how much that could cut administrative costs and reduce poverty targeting. But in this post, I want to focus on how UBI might help to insure against job loss from relatively sudden unexpected HLAI.

Imagine a small “demonstration level” UBI, just big enough to one side to say “okay we started a UBI, now it is your turn to lower other poverty programs, before we raise UBI more.” Even such a small UBI might be enough to deal with HLAI, if its basic income level were tied to the average income level. After all, an HLAI economy could grow very fast, allowing very fast growth in the incomes that biological human gain from owning most of the capital in this new economy. Soon only a small fraction of that income could cover a low but starvation-averting UBI.

For example, a UBI set to x% of average income can be funded via a less than x% tax on all income over this UBI level. Since average US income per person is now $50K, a 10% version gives a UBI of $5K. While this might not let one live in an expensive city, a year ago I visited a 90-adult rural Virginia commune where this was actually their average income. Once freed from regulations, we might see more innovations like this in how to spend UBI.

However, I do see one big problem. Most UBI proposals are funded out of local general tax revenue, while the income of a HLAI economy might be quite unevenly distributed around the globe. The smaller the political unit considering a UBI, the worse this problem gets. Better insurance would come from a UBI that is funded out of a diversified global investment portfolio. But that isn’t usually how governments fund things. What to do?

A solution that occurs to me is to push for a World Basic Income (WBI). That is, try to create and grow a coalition of nations that implement a common basic income level, supported by a shared set of assets and contributions. I’m not sure how to set up the details, but citizens in any of these nations should get the same untaxed basic income, even if they face differing taxes on incomes above this level. And this alliance of nations would commit somehow to sharing some pool of assets and revenue to pay for this common basic income, so that everyone could expect to continue to receive their WBI even after an uneven disruptive HLAI revolution.

Yes, richer member nations of this alliance could achieve less local poverty reduction, as the shared WBI level couldn’t be above what the poor member nations could afford. But a common basic income should make it easier to let citizens move within this set of nations. You’d less have to worry about poor folks moving to your nation to take advantage of your poverty programs. And the more that poverty reduction were implemented via WBI, the bigger would be this advantage.

Yes, this seems a tall order, probably too tall. Probably nations won’t prepare, and will then respond to a HLAI transition slowly, and only with what ever resources they have at their disposal, which in some places will be too little. Which is why I recommend that individuals and smaller groups try to arrange their own assets, insurance, and sharing. Yes, it won’t be needed for a while, but if you wait until the signs of something big soon are clear, it might then be too late.

I tried to design my proposal carefully to avoid many potential problems. But Merkle seems to have thrown many of my cautions to the wind. So let me explain my concerns with his variations.

First, I had conservatively left existing institutions intact for Vote on Values; we’d elect representatives to oversee the definition and measurement of a value metric. Merkle instead has each citizen each year report a number in [0,1] saying how well their life has gone that year:

Annually, all citizens are asked to rank the year just passed between 0 and 1 (inclusive). .. it is intended to provide information about one person’s state of satisfaction with the year that has just passed. .. Summed over all citizens and divided by the number of citizens, this gives us an annual numerical metric between 0 and 1 inclusive. .. An appropriately weighted sum of annual collective welfares, also extending indefinitely into the future, would then give us a “democratic collective welfare” metric. .. adopting a discount rate seems like at least a plausible heuristic. .. To treat their death: .. ask the person who died .. ask before they die. .. [this] eliminates the need to evaluate issues and candidates. The individual citizen is called upon only to determine whether the year has been good or bad for themselves. .. We’ve solved .. the need to wade through deceptive misinformation.

Yes, it could be easy to decide how your last year has gone, even if it is harder to put that on a scale from worst to best possible. But reporting that number is not your best move here! Your optimal strategy here is almost surely “bang-bang”, i.e., reporting either 0 or 1. And you’ll probably want to usually give the same consistent answer year after year. So this is basically a vote, except on “was this last year a good or a bad year?”, which in practice becomes a vote on “has my life been good or bad over the last decades.” Each voter must pick a threshold where they switch their vote from good to bad, a big binary choice that seems ripe for strong emotional distortions. That might work, but it is pretty far from what voters have done before, so a lot of voter learning is needed.

I’m much more comfortable with futarchy that uses value metrics tied to the reason an organization exists. Such as using the market price of investment to manage an investment, attendance to manage a conference, or people helped (& how much) to manage a charity.

If there are too many bills on the table at anyone one time for speculators to consider, many bad ones can slip through and have effects before bills to reverse them can be proposed and adopted. So I suggested starting with a high bar for bills, but allowing new bills to lower the bar. Merkle instead starts with a very low bar that could be raised, and I worry about all the crazy bills that might pass before the bar rises:

Initially, anyone can propose a bill. It can be submitted at any time. .. At any time, anyone can propose a new method of adopting a bill. It is evaluated and put into effect using the existing methods. .. Suppose we decided that it would improve the stability of the system if all bills had a mandatory minimum consideration period of three months before they could be adopted. Then we would pass a bill modifying the DAO to include this provision.

I worried that the basic betting process could bias the basic rules, so I set basic voting and process rules off limits from bet changes, and set an independent judiciary to judge if rules are followed. Merkle instead allows this basic bet process to change all the rules, and all the judges, which seems to me to risk self-supporting rule changes:

How the survey is conducted, and what instructions are provided, and the surrounding publicity and environment, will all have a great impact on the answer. .. The integrity of the annual polls would be protected only if, as a consequence, it threatened the lives or the well-being of the citizens. .. The simplest approach would be to appoint, as President, that person the prediction market said had the highest positive impact on the collective welfare if appointed as President. .. Similar methods could be adopted to appoint the members of the Supreme Court.

Finally, I said explicitly that when the value formula changes then all the previous definitions must continue to be calculated to pay off past bets. It isn’t clear to me that Merkle adopts this, or if he allows the bet process to change value definitions, which also seems to me to risk self-supporting changes:

We leave the policy with respect to new members, and to births, to our prediction market. .. difficult to see how we could justify refusing to adopt a policy that accepts some person, or a new born child, as a member, if the prediction market says the collective welfare of existing members will be improved by adopting such a policy. .. Of greater concern are changes to the Democratic Collective Welfare metric. Yet even here, if the conclusion reached by the prediction market is that some modification of the metric will better maximize the original metric, then it is difficult to make a case that such a change should be banned.

I’m happy to see the new interest in futarchy, but I’m also worried that sloppy design may cause failures that are blamed on the overall concept instead of on implementation details. As recently happened to the DAO concept.

People tend to act to help themselves. Sometimes that is good, and sometimes it is bad. We economists distinguish situations where such acts on net 1) help others, 2) hurt others less than they help oneself, and 3) hurt others more they help oneself. We see only type #3 acts as bad, and the others as good.

However, I’m coming to realize that most people actually use a different criteria; they care more about loyalty than efficiency. That is, they ask: are the acts subject to “our” prestige control? How well can “we”, by applying or changing our common notion of prestige, shame people to make them stop, or praise people to make them start?

We fear powerful people who feel free to defy us. When they can make big changes to the world, and put only minor weight on our prestige influence. We are afraid of this even when their actions have so far been of type #1, benefiting us. We fear that their inclination to be helpful could change after they accumulate enough power.

This is the standard attitude of foragers, as described by Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest, where the main fear was individuals strong enough to defy the consensus of their local band. It is also echoed in the classic “illicit dominator” fictional villain. (A “dominator” needs only a source of power that can defy prestige.) In schoolyards, kids have long sought to ridicule nerds who submit to teachers, instead of joining other kids in resisting teacher dominance.

In the classic tv show Survivor, participants tended to vote off the island opponents strong enough to earn immunity from group votes, no matter what those people’s other virtues. Similarly, in office politics workers who feel productive enough to not need to make arbitrary displays of submission are often seen as “difficult”; putting them in their place becomes a priority.

In larger politics today, the main villains are powers who feel free to defy national or world culture’s regarding proper behavior. Criminals (and “terrorists”) and foreign powers, especially in war, obviously, but also one’s own government unless it uses democracy or something to show its submission to local prestige. In the past, when religion was stronger, churches demanded so much submission that they were vulnerable to being labelled illicit dominators. Politics has often been about gaining support for one power via seeing it as protecting us from other powers.

Today, our other main candidate for illicit dominators are for-profit firms. Bigness triggers forager suspicions all by itself, ordering employees about adds a vivid image of dominance, and a for-profit status declares the limited influence of prestige. So we are very suspicious of big organization choices, especially for-profits, and especially regarding employees. We want to regulate their prices and quality, and especially how they hire, fire, and promote. We mostly don’t trust competition between firms to induce them to benefit us; yeah that might work sometimes, but more direct control feels more reliable. (Even if it actually isn’t.)

All of this makes it pretty easy to predict our fears regarding the future. Foreign powers create the classic apocalyptic conflict, and criminals going wild is the classic post-apocalyptic fear. A foreign power winning over us is the classic alien war allegory. Governments being non-democratic, and acquiring new powers, describes most of the new young adult dystopias. Sometimes there’s a new church with too much power, defying reader prestige rankings.

But if you imagine religions, governments, and criminals not getting too far out of control, and a basically capitalist world, then your main future fears are probably going to be about for-profit firms, especially regarding how they treat workers. You’ll fear firms enslaving workers, or drugging them into submission, or just tricking them with ideology. In this way firms might make workers into hyper submissive “inhuman robots”, with no creativity, initiative, or leisure, possibly even no socializing, sex, music, or laughter, and maybe just maybe no consciousness at all.

And if you are one of the rare people who don’t even fear firms, because you see competition as disciplining them, well you can just fear technology itself being out of control. No one has been driving the technology train; tech mostly just appears and gets used when some find that in their interest, regardless of the opinions of larger communities of prestige. One can fear that this sort of competition and tech driven change will be the force that makes human workers into “inhuman robots.” Making you eager for a world government (or a super-intelligence) to take control of tech change.

This framework seems to successfully predict the main future fears raised early in the industrial revolution. And also the main concerns about the scenario of my book. Of course the fact that we may be primed to have such concerns, regardless of their actual relevance, doesn’t make them wrong. But it does mean we should look at them carefully.

Imagine an ancient forager band had a conflict. For example, imagine some were eating foods that induced stinky farts which bothered others who slept nearby. There are several generic ways to deal with such a conflict:

Force – someone strong might destroy the stinky foods, or threaten to beat up those who eat them.

Deal – those bothered by the smell might compensate others for not eating stinky foods.

Exit – those bothered by the smell might leave and find or form another band.

Prestige – prestigious folks could push the idea that eating stinky foods is low prestige, to shame people into not eating them.

I think foragers had a strong preference for this last type of solution. But note that prestige is not available as a solution to conflicts unless prestige is in part political. If prestige were a fixed thing, say some fixed weighting of smart, strong, tall, etc., then it couldn’t be changed to solve problems. But if prestige is somewhat flexible, a dominant political coalition can try to flex it to encourage desired outcomes.

Now consider an analogous global conflict today, such as global warming. It seems to me that people also intuitively prefer a prestige solution. Instead of forming a world government powerful enough to impose its will, or making a deal where rich nations pay poor ones whatever it takes to get them to sign, what elite nations actually seem to be doing is visibly cutting back on carbon, and trying to shame other nations into following their lead. They’d rather risk failing to solve the problem than having to resort to a non-prestige solution. Arguably prestige is in part how world elites actually pushed for changes such as more democracy, less slavery, and better protected environments.

I’m also reminded of how people seem to prefer to choose their lawyers, doctors, investment advisors, etc. via prestige, instead of via track records or incentive contracts. And how people want to change who succeeds in the world via pushing elite colleges and institutions to change their admissions process, instead of reducing barriers to competition to make success more meritocratic.

There are two kinds of status, sometimes called “prestige” vs. “dominance.” Both exist, but on the surface at least we want the former to matter more than the latter. And we often seem to categorize gaining via trade or personal effort as gaining via dominance. Which is in part why we often dislike market based solutions. But note that these two kinds of status could also be called “politics” vs. “non-political reality”. We prefer social outcomes to be determined by prestige that can be influenced by dominant political coalitions, and fear and suspect social outcomes determined by nature, personal effort, or social competition, even when such competition is peaceful.

I recently posted on a hypothetical “kilo-vote” scenario intended to help show that most of us don’t vote mainly to influence who wins the election. However, the ability of any given scenario to convince a reader of such a result depends on many details of the scenario, and of reader beliefs about behavior. So on reflection, I’ve come up with a new scenario I think can persuade more people, because in it fewer things change from the prototypical voting scenario.

Imagine that polls stayed open for a month before the election deadline, and that a random one percent of voters were upgraded to “super-voters,” who can privately vote up to twenty times, as long as they wait at least an hour between votes. When a super-voter votes all twenty times, their votes are doubled, and counted as forty votes. “Privately” means no one else ever knows that this person was a super-voter. (Yes that could be hard to achieve, but just assume that it is achieved somehow.)

To a voter who cares mainly about picking the election winner, and who casts only a tiny fraction of the votes, the value of voting is proportional to their number of votes. Twice the votes gives twice the value. If such a person votes when they are an ordinary voter, then they should be greatly tempted to vote twenty times as a super-voter; their costs aren’t much more than twenty times their costs from voting once, yet for that effort they get forty votes.

I feel pretty sure that most of the people assigned to super-voter status would not in fact vote twenty times. Yes I haven’t tested this, but I’d be willing to bet on it. Most voters care a lot more about seeming to have done their duty than they do about maximizing any new opportunities that arise from being assigned super-voter status. So most super-voters would think they’d done their duty with their first vote. After all, if voting once is good enough for ordinary voters who are not assigned to super-voter status, why shouldn’t that be good enough for super-voters as well?